With the north’s durability.
Then let his invention the secret unfold,
To be crafty and cunning, yet generous and bold;
And teach your youthful blood, as poets can,
To fall in love according to a plan.
Myself have a shrewd notion where we might
Enlist a cunning craftsman of this nature,
And Mr. Microcosmus he is hight.
Faust.
What am I then, if still I strive in vain
To reach the crown of manhood’s perfect stature,
The goal for which with all my life of life I strain?
Mephistopheles.
Thou art, do what thou wilt, just what thou art.
Heap wigs on wigs by millions on thy head,
And upon yard-high buskins tread,
Still thou remainest simply what thou art.
Faust.
I feel it well, in vain have I uphoarded
All treasures that the mind of man afforded,
And when I sit me down, I feel no more
A well of life within me than before;
Not ev’n one hairbreadth greater is my height,
Not one inch nearer to the infinite.
Mephistopheles.
My worthy friend, these things you view,
Just as they appear to you;
Some wiser method we must shape us,
Ere the joys of life escape us.
Why, what the devil! hands and feet,
Brain and brawn and blood are thine;
And what I drink, and what I eat,
Whose can it be, if ’tis not mine?
If I can number twice three horses,
Are not their muscles mine? and when I’m mounted,
I feel myself a man, and wheel my courses,
Just as if four-and-twenty legs I counted.
Quick then! have done with reverie,
And dash into the world with me!
I tell thee plain, a speculating fellow
